ZooWoo
Higher math was Greek to me. Arithmetic I could handle but algebra in freshmen year of high school was hieroglyphics sans Rosetta stone.
Nuns taught algebra to college-bound students. Algebra-for-dummies was taught by Joe Callahan, Camden Catholic's assistant football coach and once its star fullback. Joe hardly asked questions, got no replies when he did, and didn't send students to blackboard to solve algebraic equations. Joe did that himself while thinking aloud as students sat practicing yawns without opening mouth, a survival skill when schooled by nuns.
I entered sophmore geometry ill-equipped to fathom pi squared, hypotenuse or parallelograms, and didn't reach calculus or trig because nuns diverted my ilk to Functional Math. Known as "flunky math," it was a bare-bones course for youth deemed unfit for college.
Yet verbal skills came easy even as peers who shined at trig struggled with history, religion, composition and literature. Maybe I was right-brain dominant and they left. Or, my aversion to numbers may've resulted from an incident that became an oft-told tale among Mom and her waitress pals.
It happened on a muggy Saturday, circa 1951. Mary Duffy took off from work to take her three kids to the Philadelphia Zoo. We traveled by city bus from our south Jersey flat across the Ben Franklin Bridge over the oily Delaware River. No aircon then, so the bus rumbled along with its windows wide open. Summer's heat was worse than river's smell.
In addition to seeing exotic animals, for kids a zoo meant a daylong gorge
on peanuts, cola, cotton candy, corn-on-the-cob, hot dogs, ice cream.
Mom's purse was lean but such outings were rare, so she indulged us on
our only childhood visit to a zoo. Other than gorging, I recall nothing of
the zoo or its animals. The day's etched memory begins as we and other visitors exit after 4 p.m., walking en masse toward a nearby bus terminal.
"Mom, I gotta go," I whined as she pulled me along by my chubby hand.
